Stories from the point of view of an abstract concept. No anthropomorphism. I mean, you can write from the pov of the concept of anthropomorphisn itself, But don't, you know, anthropomorphize it.

250 words

Failure of ImaginationWord Count: 95

There it ended abruptly: the promise, unfulfilled. It had promised, as many things do, only to lead me to the wasteland of unfulfillment. Was I naive? Was I unfaithful? Misled as I had been past by the hydra-headed wiles of procrastination? I did not think so.

And yet here I am: pursued by deadline, at the precipice of nowhere. What do I dread more? The coronation by that laurel of thorns? Or the plunge to efface my misbeget?

Some notes on this week: You guys did really well. Even the low end of the week wasn't especially bad; it took a bit of discussion to arrive at our two negative mentions. No one jumped on the loss grenade. I was genuinely expecting you all to gently caress it up or fail in droves, but what I got was a surprising range in tone and content. According to TDers, objects are tragic observers of the passage of time. They yearn to be used. They are helpless but not unconcerned. They remember what we forget and sometimes what we could never know. I will forever feel even guiltier for the time I left Snuggybear in the Mexican restaurant and didn't go back for him. I'm now terrified by the concept that every object I've ever owned is out there somewhere, forlorn and purposeless.

So yeah I'd call that a successful week

Negative mentions

Invisible Clergy gets a DM for writing a story where the assigned object lacked any semblance of a point of view or inner life. In a week full of interesting voices and perspectives, it wasn't enough to narrate the life of an object without any editorializing whatsoever. Hawklad takes the loss. There's a weird tone mismatch between the whimsical idea of snowglobe mermen who think they're warriors and the situation with this rapidly escalating domestic abuse. Either element could've worked, but together it made for an incongruous reading experience.

Sorry guys! Well fought.

Ock! mentions

Yoruichi for writing a story about four horny bedposts who get a rage boner.

Positive mentions

Djeser takes home an easy HM for writing a story that put us in the head of an oldass door. Also, pretty words. Thranguy gets an HM for clever prompt usage. Antivehicular gets an HM for impressing at least 2 of the judges by successfully conveying the inner life of a lost playing card. steeltoedsneakers gets an HM for punching at least 2 of the judges in the gut.

Winner

Full disclosure, I don't know how I feel about giving out this win. But there was one story that the judges kept coming back to as their favorite, so the only correct option is to give that story the win, though we might have reservations about the winner. JOHN MADNESS, you registered your account the same day you signed up for thunderdome. You appear to type in all caps. You are by all appearances a gimmick account, but dammit we all independently arrived at the conclusion that yours was our favorite story.

Here're some of my judgethoughts for object week. Link to individual crits is here (currently incomplete, will update as I go).

This was a pretty fun prompt and I loved seeing what y'all did with your objects in the smaller word count. Some of you did a lot of setup but found yourself with only a paragraph or so worth of words to tie things up. The best stories were the ones that setup what they were about while driving towards some sort of conclusion. There were a good handful of stories that had a cool premise, but didn't do much with it, which was frustrating.

My fellow judges and I were struck by how bleak some of the stories were. Which of course makes total sense in hindsight. Objects are limited to viewing and thinking and wishing. It was only natural for a theme to evolve from that.

But overall I enjoyed a lot of the stories. The ones that ended up at the bottom of the pile were either needlessly dense, abrupt, boring or slightly offensive.

Right, I'm about to turn 30 and am feeling the sphincteresque clutch of age tightening its grip. So let's make this short and snappy like me.

Your stories will all be from the perspective of an object.Not a plant, not an animal, not a person, not an anthropomorphized singing candelabra. A normal, everyday(ish) object. BUT DIFFERENT FROM LAST WEEK OKAY BECAUSE YOU ARE GOING TO ANTHROPOMORPHIZE YOUR OBJECT SO THAT IT IS ALL THE WAY A HUMAN PERSON

LIKE

IF I GIVE YOU A false door of Kha 2288-2170 BC Egyptian limestone THEN MAYBE YOUR HUMAN PERSON IS FOUR THOUSAND YEARS OLD OR COVERED IN EGYPT TATTOOS

IF I GIVE YOU A CANDLE THEN MAYBE YOUR HUMAN PERSON IS KINDA WAXY OR THEIR HAIR CATCHES ON FIRE IN THE STORY

I DON'T KNOW

I'M SURE YOU CAN COME UP WITH SOMETHING COOL JUST MAKE SURE YOUR OBJECT QUALITIES ARE IMPORTANT AND/OR INTERESTING

here's a list to help you not gently caress up:

I'll say it again: your object MUST be your protagonist and point of view character. THIS IS GOOD

That said, your POV can still be in first, second, or third person. You're not limited to first person. THIS IS CORRECT

No seriously, you can't just have the object I give you simply appear in the story. Your object is the main character. YES

Your object can't do anything a mundane object wouldn't be able to do. Again, I don't want you to anthropomorphize the object. THIS IS DIFFERENT YOUR OBJECT IS ACTUALLY A HUMAN PERSON WITH THE QUALITIES OF THE OBJECT

That said, your object should still have some sort of inner life—a personality. YEAH THIS STILL MAKES SENSE I THINK

You can have humans, animals, and (obviously) other objects in your story as long as none of the above rules are broken. COOL

If I sense that you are trying to do something ~clever~ that isn't in the spirit of the prompt I will come down on you with all the piss and vinegar of my advanced years. I'M NOT SURE WHY I WOULDN'T WANT YOU TO BE CLEVER SO YOU CAN BE CLEVER I GUESS

When you sign up, I will assign you an object. If you have something you feel particularly compelled to write about, you're welcome to choose your own object. I reserve the authority to veto self-chosen objects that don't fit the spirit of the prompt.

All genres are welcome so long as you don't break the above rules. No spoiler tags, quote tags, google docs, political satire, screeds, erotica, or fanfic.

I especially enjoyed the stories below so wanted to give the authors a quick shout out (in no particular order). There probably should have been more but twenty-something stories is a lot to read and remember in a short time span.

False door of Kha, Egyptian, 2288-2170 BCE (ancient Egyptian door) - The history bits included in this story were wonderful, as was the door being disoriented when removed. I laughed when the door was so pleased after someone apparently set their lunch on top of it (on top of the glass that now covered it), believing it to be an offering.

The Pipe and the Crab (Meerschaum smoking pipe) – Very original. The first paragraph drew me in: “When eyes are carved, the stone begins to see. When a mouth is carved, the stone longs to babble. When the face is finally carved, the stone begins to think, to love, to feel pain.”

The cool image of a hermit crab walking around with a pipe for its shell has stayed with me, too. I like to walk the beach and coming across something like that would be quite memorable. Nice work.

Bed (hospital bed) - I would have liked this even better without the sticker element, which I found a little distracting for some reason. But I loved the idea of the bed holding the patients’ memories. Also, how the memories were wiped away with disinfectant and how an earlier patient’s good memories could mitigate a current patient’s bad ones. Nice work.

Rust (wrought iron gate) – “...By now, it’s well aware of the way the man unlatches the gate, with a brusque chop, and it knows the dreary fumbling of the woman. But this small child, carried through the gate in its bundle of blankets, wakes up and wails, sending uncharted resonances thrumming through the gate’s iron bars. “

Showing the girl born into a less-than-stellar home, wanting to leave and finally succeeding, through the eyes of the entry gate. Skillful subtlety here, letting the actions speak for themselves without author-added emotion.

Self-Improvement (statue of the Buddha)- Loved this fresh take on the different phases of a young girl's life. Good job.

WhoopieCat fucked around with this message at Oct 3, 2018 around 16:35

im just going to post a few crits once or twice a day between now and Friday I think

Week 321 crits pt 1 of ???

Whoopiecat - Faux

Before I critique the actual events of the story, I want to critique a decision you made. This story contains a LOT of characters. Because of that, the party itself seems like the main character. There’s just too much going on for the reader to zero in on the bear head as the protagonist, though it’s not for lack of trying.

Okay so about the “plot” (I’ll be using this term loosely throughout these crits). The narrative is basically a camera panning around this party, revealing these shallow, cheating Mcmansion-dwellers in ones and twos. The conversation sort of bounces back and forth between the Japanese concept of inner/outer masks and Melinda assuring her guests that it’s fine if they spill things and vomit everywhere because I guess everything about her home is fake. The bear mutely judges all from behind his Smokey the Bear costume. In the distance, a fire draws nearer to the party.

You try to do this thing with the concept of tatamae/honne, but it falls a little flat because I have a hard time imagining that these people’s inner lives are any less shallow than their facades. Melinda is the closest thing we have to a three dimensional character, but she’s kind of your boilerplate repressed homemaker. She’s polite and cheery and permissive because inside she’s deeply unhappy. Nothing new there. But the bigger problem I have with Melinda is that she obscures the bear head as your POV character.

Overall, this is a portrait of upper-middle class ennui that I feel like I’ve seen before. What would’ve made it stand out more would be if the bear head had a more prominent “voice” in the narrative; that is, those passages that indicate the bear’s feelings need to come a lot more frequently and have a lot more zazz.

Mr. Sunshine - The long dark

I’m not sure what I was hoping for this week, but this is definitely close to the ambiguous mark. You wrote convincingly about the inner life of an exceedingly old bottle of wine. I enjoyed the...directness? of the prose. Sometimes when people write from a non-human POV, there’s this temptation to describe ordinary things as though an alien is seeing them for the first time. The language is nice, though I did wonder how an old bottle of wine would know about falling snow. That particular simile stood out to me because it was both cliche and kind of out of place.

You completely succeeded at creating an inanimate protagonist. My main critique is that the story is very slow until the end, at which point it escalates rapidly and without much warning. This wasn’t the only story to do that, and it wasn’t the only story where the object was broken in the defense of its user. I do think this one pulled it off better than some, though it would’ve been cool if the “action”, so to speak, had escalated more steadily, at a driving pace. Thranguy’s story is a decent example of that in action, as is Anomalous Blowout’s.

LITERALLY A BIRD - Looking/Seeing

So, let’s see. We’ve got a mirror who loves the heck out of the people who use it. At first I was interpreting the mirror’s adoration of its users as a reflection of their vanity. But the two women we see in the story seem pretty down to earth and not particularly self-absorbed. The mirror loves them, and they seem to cherish the mirror. Josie reveals that she only uses the mirror for special occasions (such as her wedding), and this seems to perplex and amuse her mom. She reveals that she looks in the mirror only when she especially wants to remember how she looked for a given occasion. The mirror is acutely aware of this fact, though I wasn’t sure how to read that final line. Is the mirror’s “I know” a bitter “I know”? Or is the mirror affirming Josie’s decision to only bring the mirror out for special occasions? I’m possibly overthinking it.

Overall, this was a pretty piece, but we have got to talk about one of your first lines:

quote:

Her lips are the color of the duvet across the room, spread smooth and velvet-red as the petals of the roses that she sometimes sets beside it.

There is just tooooo much going on here. Why couldn’t her lips just be the color of roses? The description goes lips -> duvet -> roses. A duvet can be a lot of colors and the idea of roses comes last. Things are further muddled when you tell us she only sometimes sets the roses beside the duvet. I assume the duvet is on a bed, but that’s not really indicated either way. Just overall a confusing comparison.

On a broader note, as I’m reading these first entries, I’m wondering if I’m going to see a lot of variations on the theme of the relatively unchanging nature of objects vs the rapidly changing nature of humans. That concept was pretty evident here; the mirror stays the same, while its users change. The mirror desperately loves its users, but is at their mercy, too. The next generation might not use it with the same reverence as its current owner, or the frequency of its previous owner. This is kind of an inherent tragedy of objects, I suppose.

M. Propagandolph - Blood for Blood

Hmm, I think this is probably my favorite story you’ve written so far. That’s not to say it doesn’t have any problems, but overall I think you made some good decisions with this prompt.

So we’ve got a staircase who seems pretty content with its life in the president’s palace. Then a tyrant comes along and turns the whole place into the set of Caligula. The staircase is in the horrifying predicament of having to endure all this because it has no other option; it can’t even trip the tyrant when he uses the stairs. When the tyrant’s regime finally collapses, he’s beheaded at the top of the stairs and his head rolls all the way down to the bottom. The staircase tastes his blood, but it’s sour, and the staircase seems to kind of bemoan that it will never be the same as it was before the tyrant.

This story has some weird language in it, I think as a consequence of the sort of baroque voice of the staircase. I’ll use the very end as an example:

quote:

A drop, ever so slight, seeped into my age, coagulated now.

I’m not sure what “seeped into my age” is referring to. It could be heavily metaphorical: the blood seeps into the actual quality of age within the staircase. Or maybe you meant something more like “...seeped into my aged wood.” The fact that it’s not clear hurts my comprehension.

Otherwise, I thought this was pretty decent.

Yoruichi - You Got Me Out Of Storage For This?

This is a silly story about a horny bed who gets a rage boner. It was amusing to read, but it’s hard to critique seriously. Your characters are more like caricatures and none of these interactions feel realistic, or even like they’re trying to be realistic. The in-joke at the end was as good as this particular in-joke is capable of being, though not all the judges were aware of the history of Ock!

On the micro level, I really like your story. You have a good ear for cant, like in “Fury Road.” Without a lot of exposition, I can by and large understand what your cyberpunk urchins are talking about.

Overall, the dialogue and narration together remind me of M.T. Anderson’s “Feed,” or Alfred Bester’s “The Computer Connection. The first is a compliment, the second is not.

You bit off more than you could chew with the amount of worldbuilding you did here. I’m sure you’ve got a bible stashed away with all the castes and powers and stuff but that eclipsed plot or character here. By the end, I’m interested in the setting, but I’m unclear why exactly I should be invested in some guy who was bred as cattle getting processed, albeit unsuccessfully.

I’m not sure whether the main’s recreational drug use spoiling the batch of clones counts as sabotage, since he did it primarily to dull the pain of being alive or whatever instead of to stop the clones from being made, but whatever, I’ll give that to you.

Pham Nuwen

-10 for naming your love-interest shaped lump “Sarah” again. Just put in the tiniest bit of effort and come up with a name rather than putting in the placeholder for “woman.”

That out of the way, I love your premise. Unlike your competition, Soylent Green, I haven’t seen it a thousand times. I like how your reflections of your proletarian everyman aren’t there to compliment him or force him to develop his character, but are just an annoying thing that happens.

Definitely fits the theme of sabotage, and is seamlessly integrated with no exposition. Really cool story, I like it a lot.